Oh Reddit, Thy Mystery is&nbspInfinite

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Most folks who hadn't heard of Reddit before November certainly have now. With the sale to Conde Nast, Reddit has joined the ranks of social media property successes (congrats, BTW to Paul Graham & Y Combinator). To a web marketer, though, Reddit remains an enigma shrouded in a mystery, encapsulated in a cute little robot:

From our research, Reddit is one of the very best places to go linkbaiting. While the traffic is typically between 3-6,000 uniques over 24 hours (and totals less than 7,500 over two weeks), the links are amazing. Bloggers and pundits and news sites pick up Reddit material with abandon - I usually don't point to Google search numbers but they make a case here: search for via reddit -site:reddit.com (250K results) vs. via digg -site:digg.com (600K results). Yes, Digg is much bigger (and has been around and popular for longer), but Reddit shows a small number of stories compared to Digg, meaning that for every Reddit story, you get more play in the blogosphere, more links and more reach (just what every linkbaiter wants).

The problem is - I can't seem to figure Redditers out. As many times as we've tried to submit links to them for clients or just in general (to try to grow our profiles), they never succeed. We've had several articles/tools/sites on there, but always by accident - someone else submits it and it goes to the top of the site. Unlike the Digg or del.icio.us audience, or even the folks at Slashdot, Fark, Shoutwire and Netscape, there seems to be no clear demographic or tendency that you can focus material towards in order to make it to Reddit's front page.

Anyone have any advice? Who are these mysterious Redditers? How do we/you find/make content that pleases them?

That's a nice trick to start a discussion, but I doubt you don't have any ideas, Rand.

But anyway, you can analyze the 1000 of pages that hit the Reddit homepage for a certain period of time (better yet, for a single, SEM related topic) and see the pattern. Or wait till SEOmozzers give you the data for 1000 entries.

Do I need to say it'll make good, linkable content? It'll be a start of Reddit quality degradation, though, I am sure, too.

I have submitted few articles and I could get fair amount of traffic, but I am still trying to figure out what is responsible for making it to the top, it's something more than a persuasive title, content or time of submission.

I hope someone reads this and can shed come light. I can't even get stuff to show up on reddit. We are a small site about Dubai and adding stuff to reddit always brouight in people we never got on the homepage etc but it was ok.

But for the last month or so no matter wot we do, out stuff never gets on to reddit it's as if our IP/SITE/Accounts have been banned , i even added BBC stuff on and it didnt appear on the page.

If you do a seardch for our site "thedubailife.com" you get 5 results , its crazy man!!

As someone who has had over a dozen articles make it to the front page (including a couple that have made it to #1), I still can't honestly figure out what the pattern is.

Some of it comes down to pure luck. If a few people down-vote an article in the first few minutes, the article will get buried. If it "survives" that period, then it has some chance.

After all is said and done, it seems that the reddit audience is relatively scattered (i.e. doesn't fit a particular profile). I likely get a little bit of reddit love because my topic (startups) seems to appeal to the reddit crowd at some level.

Of all the social bookmarking sites for me Reddit has the least sense of community. I don't see any witty or trollish banter. I don' see any grouping of like/dislike mindedness. In fact I sometimes wonder if there are actual people there and not just bots voting and floating in a virtual matrix. In a web 2.0 world where the norm seems to be niche thyself, Reddit exists as an amorphous blob of unclassifiable browsing bliss ... excuse me

(cough cough)

Whew I feel so much better now that I coughed up that dictionary I swallowed earlier today ;-)